Marc Thiessen, Kristen Soltis Anderson, AEI President Arthur C. Brooks, and Ed Gillespie in Cleveland, OH, on August 5, 2015. AEI Media.
On Wednesday August 5, AEI President Arthur C. Brooks met with former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, and “millennial whisperer” and author of “The Selfie Vote” Kristen Soltis Anderson, in Cleveland, OH, for a pre-debate panel about American conservatism’s ways forward into and beyond the 2016 election. Moderated by former White House speechwriter and AEI scholar Marc A. Thiessen, the panel asked why conservatives — who regularly demonstrate advantages on qualities of ideas and leadership — do so poorly in national opinion polling on the question “Do they care about me?”
Thanks to data conveyed in Brooks’s New York Times bestseller The Conservative Heart, Soltis Anderson’s recent book The Selfie Vote, and Gillespie’s firsthand experiences running as a candidate the Senate, the speakers produced an answer: conservatives have a fundamental communication problem. They elaborated on this problem as one that can and must be overcome in order to win the 2016 presidential election. As Brooks said, conservatives are “moralists dressed as materialists,” and liberals “materialists dressed as moralists.” What America wants, he insisted, are “moralists dressed like moralists.” If conservatives learn to speak less about the process of governing well than about the tangible life-outcomes for people of governing well, all three argued, then what is “written on our [conservatives’] hearts” will match what the American people know of conservatives. And that will translate not only into a victory for conservatives, but into a “victory for those we work for and represent.”
Here are a few great snippets from the panel, which you can watch in its entirety here:
From Brooks:
“I believe, looking at the data, that Americans are truly looking for an excuse to vote Republican… and we’re not giving them an excuse.”
“Capitalism is part of American social justice.”
“We need to push opportunity down to those who need it most.”
From Gillespie:
“We need to address the needs of the working poor who are just getting hammered in this economy.”
“From immigrant janitors to the West Wing in two generations… I want every family to have that opportunity.”
“We need to realize that the old normal is the new mediocre.”
From Soltis Anderson:
“But how can you be a Republican? You seem so nice and normal!” (The response she would often receive in college when people learned she was a conservative.)
“The defenders of the status quo are often to the Left. It’s typically not the Republicans putting up roadblocks [to change and innovation].”
“We can have good and pure motives for believing in free markets.”
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